


Of gold and lute

by MagicHats



Category: Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer featuring The Legend of Zelda (Video Game), Crypt of the NecroDancer, The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2020-07-07 17:46:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19856377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicHats/pseuds/MagicHats
Summary: Cadence finds herself in a strange land. She's pretty sure that whatever is plaguing the lands, it's similarities with the Necrodancer's crypt isn't a coincidence.A slightly different retelling of Cadence of Hyrule, mostly focusing on Cadence's perspective.





	1. Cadence goes to Hyrule

With a groan, Cadence picked herself up.

It was too _bright_.

She really wasn’t sure what had just happened, all she knew was that at one moment she was minding her own business. The next moment, she was in the air and then falling. Face-planting on the ground sucked. At least it wasn’t the worst fall she’s taken. It’d been weeks since the whole crypt incident, and had finally gotten adjusted to normal life again.

After getting up, she glanced around, trying to work out her surroundings. Didn’t seem like any place that she knew.

“Hey! Hey _you!_ ”

She whipped around, trying to find the source of the light. She saw what looked to be a little Pixie. She didn’t move, but let the pixie approach her. That’s how those were like in the crypt. The last thing she wanted to do now was startle it and have it explode.

“I saw you fall from the sky! That landing wasn't very graceful. Are you okay?”

She had to stare for a second. That’s _weird_. None of the pixies from the crypt ever really spoke at all. But that being said, she also figured that most of the monsters there were either created from the whole event or otherwise roped in and left as equally helpless to fight it as she was.

“Oh! You're not Hylian? So you're new here! I'm Trill. Nice to meet you!”

“… Likewise,” Cadence replied. It was weird, sure, but so long that the pixie seemed friendly she would be alright. She wasn’t sure what Hylian _meant_ , but she was already pretty sure she was somewhere else entirely. She hadn’t heard of any such places back in town.

After glancing around a bit more, she saw the ruins and figured that it seemed like the best place to go. There wasn’t much else in the area besides forests, and the closer she got to an actual town, the better. In what little adventuring and exploring she had done before falling into the Necrodancer's crypt, finding a graveyard or a tomb was a good indicator that there was a normal settlement nearby.

Just as she started moving, the pixie cut her off again.

“Looks like you can still move! I'm glad you're not injured!”

Cadence could feel herself jump a little at the sudden outburst, before she shook her head and went towards the building. She listened to Trill prattle on about something as she was walking up to the door.

“But you have unfortunate timing... Something **_strange_ **has been going on in Hyrule,” Trill continued.

Something strange? Well, it was pretty strange that she fell out of the sky. But on the other hand, given Trill’s reaction, perhaps she was implying something _more strange_ than this. She tried the door, but it didn’t seem to work. The blue pulsing eye-shape on it probably meant something _important_ , but it was beyond her. Things were starting to grow pretty peculiar.

“Oh look! A Sheikah Stone! Maybe if you bump into the Sheika Stone to activate it...” Trill started, zipping over to the object in question. After a beat, Trill flied back over the door.

“...It'll open this door.”

With an internal groan, Cadence walked over to the Stone and then pressed a hand on it. It made a noise, and then she heard a similar noise in the direction of the door. That was easy.

She entered the ruins, and figured out very quickly it was some sort of tomb. She could feel the faintest of smirks on her face. She would be hard pressed to not recognize what a crypt was like on the inside after the whole crypt incident. With some tentative steps and strained eyes, she followed the clearest way forward. Of course, the trees would have been cut down, but whoever did that didn’t take any care to also remove the stumps.

“Looks like there's some dead wood in your way. Can you find something to help you get past it? I'm _Stumped!"_ Trill chirped.

Cadence groaned.

That was a _terrible_ pun. She’d become a bit too acquainted with puns after her ordeal in the Necrodancer's crypt. She really couldn’t help the groan. At least in the crypt there was nobody pointing out the wordplay to each monster she saw. Sure, it didn’t _help_ her case that she’d figure out the wordplay on sight, but simply having the pun pointed out was enough to rile her up.

Trill was right though, since the stumps were too big to simply step over.

_How are these so big and there’s not a hole in the ceiling?_ She wondered to herself, glancing between the stumps _._

She started to investigate the surrounding area, and quickly went up the set of stairs she saw after backing up a few paces. She was an experienced adventurer at this point, since the Necrodancer’s crypt necessitated it. Finding something to get the stumps out couldn’t be _that_ difficult.

She found what seemed to be the most obvious chest she'd come across in a while. As she walked up to it, she could feel her eyebrows raise. Most places keep the fancier chests _out of the way_. There was only one place where such decorated chests were just left in the open.

Prying the chest open, she saw nothing more than an already lit torch. Grabbing it and holding it up, she stared for a second before heading back down the stairs. Things were just getting weirder and weirder. The similarities in this situation and that of the Necrodancer’s crypt were growing a bit too large for her comfort. 

A thought hit her. The stumps had no hole in the roof above them, so they should be _dry_.

She poked one of the stumps with the tip of the now burning torch, and the stump began to burn at an alarming speed. It took no time for it to be nothing but ashes.

_That’s too fast. There’s no wood back home that would burn that fast under normal circumstances_ she thought to herself _._

“Great! You used your torch to burn the stump! But be careful; items don’t last forever and will break eventually” Trill said in a very bright tone.

Cadence tried to give the pixie the most withering look she could. She wasn’t _that new_ to adventuring, and the tone Trill had come off as, for a lack of better words, was very “hand-holdy”. Still, she wasn’t going to tell the pixie to stop following her. Aside from the constant chatter she really wasn’t doing anything actively _malicious_.

As she entered the next room, she felt something _lurch_. It was familiar yet _off_ all the same. Rather than the lurch of her heart matching the beat of the song that she was now _pointedly aware of_ in her periphery, it was the compulsory need to move. The Necrodancer’s crypt operated under that compulsion. Everything had to keep the pace, and the Necrodancer had the means to really _incentivize_ staying on beat beyond the compulsion alone. She knew the lurch of wanting to move, but all the same it felt alien without her heart trying to literally match the beat of the music.

“Watch out! This monster is not friendly! And do you hear that _intense music_? Whenever enemies are around, everyone is forced to _move to the beat_ of the song!” Trill cried, managing to be heard over the music that had swiftly appeared.

As unfamiliar as this new world seemed to be, she loathed the familiarity of this particular situation. Still, she felt herself slip into what almost felt like routine for her. The creature in the room was nothing more than a greenish slime. It looked very different from the ones in the crypt, but it was acting the same way, and that was the important part.

Everything had a pattern. It was just a matter of figuring out the pattern.

After defeating the slime with a flourish of the dagger she always kept on hand, she pressed on. Before falling into the Necrodancer’s crypt, she didn’t always carry a dagger on her, but after that whole ordeal she’d found that it was a handy thing to have in a pinch. She let the beat practically carry her towards the monster in the next room, a similar blue slime who was hopping in the same, predictable pattern as the others that she'd already seen.

“The good news is that monsters always dance in _simple patterns_. Learn their patterns, and you'll always be able to defeat them _without getting hurt_ yourself!”

Cadence knew logically that Trill was simply trying to be helpful. Were it anybody else, anybody who hadn’t been in that crypt, this sort of information would be great. But unfortunately, it was _her_ , and not somebody else. She had to know this stuff pretty well to get out of that crypt with her life. She didn’t think she would need that knowledge again, and Trill pointing out what was obvious to her didn’t help her mood.

She pushed ahead to the next room and found a very different figure. As opposed to the somewhat familiar slimes from before. This figure looked sort of like a goblin, but also sort of _not?_ She really wasn’t sure what to make of this figure in comparison to anything else she had seen. Maybe her confusion had been all over her face, because Trill had chosen this time to speak up.

“This monster has a very _simple pattern_ , too. He moves every _other_ beat and puts his arms up _before_ he jumps!”

“Huh” Cadence said halfheartedly.

True to Trill’s statement, the creature put his arms up and then leaped forwards a space. This must have been like the skeletons, but much more _alive_. She dispatched it in no time, and then pushed further. The exit to the ruin had to be here somewhere. As she pressed ahead, she made quick work of the slime that had hopped in place in the middle of the tight hallway. Perhaps all of this was meant to be intimidating, but she couldn’t be bothered. She really did have larger things on her mind than being intimidated by ooze.

She saw more slimes and frowned, but then she also saw the broadsword that was laying prone on the ground in front of them. The slimes were the sort who were hopping in place, so she didn’t need to worry about them getting in the way. She grabbed the sword, and with a swipe, managed to clear the row. She wondered if the rules of the crypt also applied here around corners. There was an odd trick in the old crypt where she could get an enemy from around a corner sometimes. It was a bit much to wrap the mind around, but it was a weird trick that seemed to work in the crypt. She didn’t question it then _how_ it worked, and she didn’t question it now when it worked yet again.

“Wow! With that broadsword you can defeat _three enemies at once_ and strike enemies _around corners_!” Trill shouted.

The shouting felt a bit redundant to Cadence, but that being said, she could let that go. It seemed that this phenomenon was not a normal thing around these parts. Or at least wherever _here_ was.

“Being able to fight monsters without getting right next to them could come in handy” Trill continued excitedly.

_The dead weren’t getting deader. Or would that be_ more _dead?_ Cadence wondered in her mind as she headed towards the next room. It was the logical place to go, since she figured Trill would say something if she just turned around now and decided to simply _not help_ her and backed out of the tomb now. She quickly found herself in a large room, and with a menacing thud heard the door behind her slammed shut. Thankfully it was lit, and it wasn’t a packed room. A couple of slimes and the weird creatures (that functionally _acted_ like skeletons) were there, but she had handled _worse crowds_ in the crypt.

It didn’t take very long to dispatch all of them.

She felt the thing that was pulling her, the thing that compelled her to keep the beat immediately dissipate. She felt herself stumble forwards a bit, being caught off guard with how quickly that feeling had left after the last creature had been slain.

_The music had stopped._

“Phew! That _intense_ music has stopped because the enemies are gone! Now you can move as _fast_ or as _slow_ as you like”

Cadence sighed as she decided to give the building a slightly more thorough check before moving on. It was a weird adjustment to make after being in the crypt to just being able to move whenever she pleased. In the Necrodancer's crypt, _the music stopped for no one_. It was going to be rough having to go back and forth between the two a lot more frequently.

Still, she decided to push ahead. She’d already gotten pretty deep into this ruin, there wasn’t much point of backing out now. Pressing forwards just a little more yielded a result that she actually liked.

Somebody left a _perfectly good_ shovel laying around.

Cadence knew that she was pretty great with a shovel, not as good as uncle Eli, but _pretty great_. She quickly grabbed it and almost immediately started to dig at the wall ahead of her, quickly breaking through. She was about to say something that she figured would be witty and an icebreaker but then Trill decided to share her thoughts and cut off her own statement.

“Wow! you're fast with a _shovel!_ And you seem right at home in this dark, spooky _crypt_... What kind of place are you from?!?”

She decided not to dignify that with a direct response.

“You really wouldn’t believe it if I told you”

“Really?” Trill zipped ahead, only pausing a bit after her own reply.

The pair pushed deeper into the tomb. It wasn’t particularly difficult after she dug her way through the wall. With the way it had opened up, Cadence figured they ought to be close enough to the exit at this rate. Rather than a standard or typical exit, it just opened up to a room that had two strange… portals? She’d encountered a lot strange magic but this was beginning to really take the cake.

“What?! Look at these weird Portals. You can see my friends inside of them!” Trill flew around each of the portals with a particularly energetic speed.

Cadence walked towards the portals very carefully. Some part of her was pretty suspicious about the whole situation at this point. Half of her was expecting the Necrodancer to hop out of one of the portals and shout ** _“Surprise!”_**.

“If anyone can figure out what's going on in Hyrule, it's Link and Zelda. But it looks like these portals are only _one way_!”

“One way?” Cadence glanced between the two. If any of them were two way, she probably wouldn’t be thinking too hard on the choice, but now that Trill had said otherwise it was one that gave her a considerable pause.

“Will you visit Link? Or Zelda?”

Looking at the two, it seemed that the girl, _Zelda?_ Zelda seemed to be the one that needed to be woken up first. The boy seemed to be the sort that might come about on his own if left to it. She took in a deep breath, and then tried sticking her hand into the portal.

She gasped as it tugged on her arm _hard_. She felt herself get yanked forwards and then fall pretty unceremoniously into the portal. Hopefully it wasn’t going to be a long drop.

She face-planted for the second time that day. It _sucked_ , but at least the drop wasn’t bad as the drop from earlier. She felt trill land on her, which thankfully didn’t hurt in the slightest. As she got up quickly, she glanced around. The girl was in the bed that was now a few feet away. That being said, they weren’t alone. There was another person in the room, who had jumped back a bit.

“Who are you?” the figure asked with suspicion.

“I dunno but she’s a friend and she’s gonna help” Trill responded, flying up to the figure.

Cadence figured this satisfied her, since the woman (she now realized that it was a woman) gave her a more relaxed look than when she immediately got up. She decided to start approaching the sleeping girl. Trill did want her to wake up the girl after all. She only stopped after she heard the other woman speak up.

“At first, I was alarmed when you fell from the sky! But then I saw that Trill was with you, so I know you must be trustworthy. “

She gave a curt nod. There’s not much that could be said that would be a good follow up to that statement. After a figurative beat, she approached the bed where the sleeping figure was. _That’s probably Zelda then._

When she got to the girl’s bedside, she had the urge to try grabbing her and gently shaking. It couldn’t be _that_ difficult to wake up this person, _right_? Before she could start shaking her, she saw something light up on her right hand. It was a golden triangle of some sort.

_This doesn’t bode well_ she thought to herself.

It flashed pretty brightly. She sat there blinking for a second before the woman in the bed started to awaken. She felt Trill flutter around her.

“That flash! It looked like the _Triforce_!” Trill all but announced.

“I knew you were special! Thank you for helping to wake up Zelda. She has been asleep for a while, so I'm going to stay with her to explain what's going on in Hyrule”

Cadence listened to Trill as she kept an eye on Zelda. She seemed to be around her age, with similarly blond hair. That was were things ended. Maybe it was simply the fact that she was standing in front of some sort of royalty, but she was nervous about her reaction. Zelda possibly being some kind of royal would explain how luxurious the room she found herself in was. The last thing she needed was to have this important figure take the circumstances the _wrong way_ and merely throw her out of the castle, or worse, have her thrown into some kind of jail. It wouldn’t bring her any closer to finding her way back home. If anything, it would probably make it more difficult if she was branded a criminal of some kind. On a somewhat brighter note, she now had some context about _where_ she was.

As the girl began to tiredly shake her head and try to wake up more fully than where she seemed to be at, Cadence heard Trill directly address her. She decided to take that as a cue to give Zelda some space. She could see it in Zelda’s blue eyes that it wasn’t a pleasant sort of sleep that she was stuck with.

“You should try to find your way home! I hope our paths cross again someday soon, friend of Hyrule!”

“Alright then” she said, and started to head out of the room. She figured at this point it might be wise to let her do her own thing. Before she could start to leave, she noticed that she’d gotten Zelda’s attention, her blue eyes meeting her own green ones.

“Sounds like you're going to be busy for a while. I'll be around looking for a way to get back to my world. I hope to see you again!” Cadence said.

Zelda gave a polite nod of her own, and then Cadence decided to take her cue, briskly walking towards the nearest exit. Hopping over the stray pottery was surprisingly easy, at least compared to the tree stumps. As tempted as she was to simply kick the offending pot out of the way, that would have been _rude_. What sort of person shows up out of _nowhere_ and breaks peoples’ pottery anyways?

After making her way out of the castle, she started to look around. _Where_ , exactly, would the best place be to look for clues about her current problem?


	2. Chapter 2: Cadence takes stock of the Situation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cadence takes a look around at her situation and figures out what to do next. She also raises enough rupees to get a general map of Hyrule

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry the update schedule is very infrequent. I get a bit busy with life but I haven't forgotten about this fic.

Cadence grimaced to herself.

It hadn’t been _too long_ since getting out of the castle, and getting familiar with her surroundings was difficult.

She did eventually get settled in a quaint little village but that didn’t dissuade any of her immediate concerns. Those concerns were that firstly, she had no idea how to get home. Talking to the villagers didn’t give her very much information in that regard. She did learn a lot about what was going on in the land of Hyrule, but that was filed in the back of her mind.

Her second-most concern was the weird triangle that had now adorned her hand. It was on her dominant hand, and while it would disappear from time to time, bringing her hand up to her face to look at it again would reliably make it come back. Cadence hoped it wasn’t some sort of curse, or worse, something like the Golden lute. That wretched instrument had plagued her family for long enough in her opinion.

Between these two issues, Cadence had a _lot_ on her plate. Some part of her missed that little pixie that had joined her for a brief moment. That being said, Cadence also figured that whatever was going on, it was likely that nobody here had a whole lot of ideas about what had brought it about. Her hunch was that this was inevitably somehow the lute’s doing, but since magic seemed a lot more commonplace here, it could just as easily be some other problem. At least that was where the villagers were handy, what little adventuring she had done in her time before falling into the crypt had proven asking around really did help sometimes.

While they didn’t know a lot about the root cause of this whole problem, they did know quite a bit about a recent happening at the castle. According to a couple of villagers, some person by the name of Octavo had shown up and started causing havoc using his strange magics. The eerily similar name aside, they had described the guy as initially well-intentioned. Or at the very least, the guy didn’t _immediately_ turn the king to stone. He was, however, spotted with a bright lute. This was a factoid that Cadence didn’t _like_ , but also figured would be handy to know (at the very least she now knew who she was going to _beat the daylights out of with her shovel_ )

Cadence had asked how often that happened with how blasé this information was told to her. She was dismayed to find out a bit more about how common tragedy seemed to befall Hyrule. That made her even more eager to get out as soon as she reasonably could. She also felt a bit bad since she couldn’t help one of the villagers.

A villager by the name of Dampé had told her that he had found a person who was just out cold and that there was only one thing that could rouse him. She didn’t know where to begin with looking for a Hibiscus flower, but she held on to her initial goal. She really needed to work out how to get back home. She hoped that she didn’t stick out too much given how quickly those in the castle recognized her as not being from anywhere within Hyrule itself.

Some part of her was pretty giddy about there being a crypt in this village, but she decided it probably wouldn’t be a bright idea to mess with that. If a curse that admittedly seemed very similar to the Necrodancer’s own curse was actively plaguing the lands, it might not be a good idea to poke around the local crypt. Despite her intuition, she figured it was a bad idea, especially since the crypt was pretty close to Kakariko itself. It was likely still in use, which likely meant still actively used by the village. The necrodancer’s crypt was an otherwise abandoned, and out of the way enough to make that dreaded lute all the more enticing for any adventurer.

Cadence frowned after a while, sitting on a stump near the village. She’d exhausted most of her good ideas for the village. That being said, Cadence didn’t immediately want to scour all the lands to find her way home. Looking at her dominant hand, she looked at the golden mystery triangle. As handy as it was to wake up Zelda, it would have been nicer if she could get that to simply take her home. She didn’t really want to get involved with another grand adventure. She had hoped for at least a small break after the Necrodancer’s crypt before setting out on grand adventures of her own. She was raised on stories of her father and uncle’s adventures. They’d done so much, that up until quite recently she figured that this was where a lot of her quirks came from. Her mother didn’t share much of her own legacy before she had passed, and running afoul of the Necrodancer’s curse had brought a lot of interesting details to light about her mother’s line.

With a huff, she decided to set out and try to get her bearings a little bit. Unfortunately, she didn’t have any rupees, so trying to get even a general map was out of the question until she could work out how to get some currency. It didn’t take long for her to get into Hyrule fields, and to have the familiar buzz of the Necrodancer’s curse to reappear.

To the beat of some song she could hear on the wind, she bobbed and weaved between many foes. At least with regards to this hyper-specific set of circumstances, she was perhaps more than fit to go exploring the greater world. She’d gotten the impression from the townsfolk that most of them weren’t the adventuring type, and for the few that were, this was too much of a curveball to get around. The monsters roaming the lands at least still seemed to match up with her earlier observation.

Some part of her wondered how well that Princess was faring in all of this. She seemed more than capable, so it couldn’t be that far-fetched that she could be out there, trying to fix this herself. Eventually, after enough monsters dropped rupees, she turned around and began to head back. This adventure had its own perks and flaws, and the one big difference she noticed was that it was much easier to slip by enemies so long as she wasn’t in some kind of enclosed area.

She felt herself smile as she walked back into Kakariko village. Now, she could afford to get a decent map and try to work out a plan of action. It didn’t take long to get that map, and it took an even shorter amount of time to get into the Kakariko crypt. It only took one good conversation with Dampé to find out that the crypt had been infested, and Dampé was eager to get somebody to help clear a bit of it out. Sure, there was no guarantee that the monsters would stay gone, but having it clear for the moment would help the rest of the village rest a little easier.

As she set about clearing the monsters, it was refreshingly familiar. Some part of her hated that it was refreshingly familiar given how frankly traumatizing the Necrodancer’s crypt was for her. That being said, she felt herself smile a little bit as she saw an incredibly familiar sight. It was the Shopkeeper’s shop, somehow just being in the crypt for no discernible reason.

“Hey, you’re a familiar sight” she said half-heartedly.

After clearing out some more of that crypt and having a nice conversation with the Shopkeeper, she decided to call it a day. It was clear enough, and Dampé had promised to give her some rupees for her work. It’d help her try to find some shelter for the foreseeable future.

After exiting the crypt and getting that small reward, she noticed it was sunset. One last glance at her hand showed that the Mystery Triangle was still there.

_One day down, who knows how many more ahead._


End file.
